"Girls of Riyadh"

The novel "Girls of Riyadh" (Penguin, 2007), by Rajaa Alsanea, was banned in Saudi Arabia when it was published in Arabic in 2005, but apparently still managed to be read by many there. It was then translated (by the author and Marilyn Booth) into English, providing the English-speaking world with a window into the lives of young women in Saudi Arabia. It tells the story of four young women in Riyadh, their close friendship with each other, their educations and careers and families, their travels abroad, and -- most of all -- their love lives. Although these young women, along with most young women in S.A., are very limited in how much they are permitted to see and speak with young men, they find ways to do so, both in person and -- especially -- by telephone; long romances are sometimes conducted almost entirely by telephone. Of course this is fiction, but its author is a young Saudi woman herself, living in the United States at the time of publication, and I assume it is at least somewhat accurate in describing at least a certain subgroup of women and their lives. It reminds us of how young women in much of the world, even young women from the most affluent families, have far less freedom and far fewer opportunities than young men do. It also reminds us of all the ways young people find to connect and to love, despite society's restrictions. One thing I was glad to see was that at least some of these young women had access to higher education -- both in S.A. and abroad -- and good careers. I have taught Saudi women at my university, and have been very impressed with their motivation, hard work, maturity, and ambition. "The Girls of Riyadh" is not terribly well written, and perhaps sensationalizes young women's lives somewhat, but it was interesting for me to read, as it seemed to open the curtain a bit on the behind-the-scenes lives of at least some young women whose lives we in the West generally don't learn much about.

"The Rejection Collection"

If you want something hilarious to read, I recommend "The Best of the Rejection Collection: 293 Cartoons That Were Too Dumb, Too Dark, or Too Naughty for The New Yorker" (Workman, 2011), "rescued by" Matthew Diffee. The title says it all... Like many of you, I always enjoy the cartoons in The New Yorker. Those in this collection have the added appeal of the offbeat, the surprising, and the sometimes just slightly risque. The rejected cartoons are organized by cartoonist, and at the beginning of each section is an also very funny and unconventional interview with that artist. When I was shopping for Christmas gifts in one of my favorite bookstores, this book caught my eye and I had to buy it for myself; sure enough, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and now it sits on our coffee table, and I still occasionally leaf through it for a laugh. (P.S. I thought about trying to explain a couple of my favorite cartoons from this collection, but the impossibility of capturing a drawing in words defeated me. You just have to see them for yourself!)

"Lady Susan," by Jane Austen

Readers of this blog know how much I love and admire Jane Austen's fiction. The Austen canon consists, as all Austen followers know, of six glorious complete novels. There are also two unfinished novels, "Sanditon" and the "Watsons," as well as some juvenalia. Less known and lauded is a very early epistolary novel that was not published until long after Austen's death, "Lady Susan." I had read this short book before, but not for a long time; I just finished listening to it on CD. Although it does not stand up to The Six, it is enjoyable to read (or hear) and demonstrates a good portion of the wit and perceptiveness of Austen's more developed work. The novel features a widow who is not afraid to have both flirtations and affairs; somehow, despite her shaky reputation, she manages to be accepted (reluctantly) by her relatives and friends. She is very manipulative, a liar, a two-timer, a distinctly unmaternal mother to her teenaged daughter (whom she tries to force to marry a unappealing man), smart, funny, selfish, and a little bit evil. She is the villain we are meant to root against, yes, but Austen slyly makes us pull for her a bit as well, despite ourselves. I decry her willingness to use whoever can be useful to her, and to step on anyone who gets in her way, yet there is something appealing about a woman at that time in history (late 18th century) who -- unlike most women of the era -- knew what she wanted and went for it, and who was so in control of her own life and relationships.

Doctorow on Leonard

The esteemed author E. L. Doctorow (I remember reading his amazing novel “Ragtime” when it came out in the 1970s) has written a fascinating essay about, and lovely tribute to, the late great writer and critic John Leonard; this essay can be found in the 2/27/12 issue of The Nation. What struck me in the essay was Doctorow’s description of Leonard’s great love of the novel. Although he wrote about the arts and popular culture, the novel was to him the pinnacle. In a piece called “Reading for My Life,” he said (as quoted by Doctorow) that “Popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd…Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves.” For example, when he first reads Garcia Marquez’s ”One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he not only feels it is a “marvelous novel” which set his “mind on fire,” but he makes connections between this novel and others; the Buendias “invite comparison with the Karamazovs and the Sartorises.” Doctorow says Leonard saw books “as if [they] are antiphonal calls and responses”; this statement really resonated for me, as I am sure it does for many longtime readers of the great novels of the past and present that speak to each other as they speak to us. Further, the following quote from Doctorow sheds light on some of the reasons Leonard was such a great critic: “It is not only his capacious mind that distinguishes him; it is the wisdom of his critical decency. When he attends to someone’s work, there is not only illumination but a beneficence of spirit, as if, even when he doesn’t like something and will tell us why, he is still at work championing the literary project.” Doctorow concludes with the following: “With his love of language and his faith in its relevance to human salvation, [John Leonard was] our own inadvertent, secular humanist patron saint.”

Guest Post: On Annie Dillard

When I heard how much my colleague Dennis Bacigalupi admired Annie Dillard, I asked if he would write a guest post about his feelings about her work, and I am pleased and honored that he agreed to do so. You can read his thoughts below.

"When I first read her 1975 Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction narrative “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Annie Dillard became a cornerstone of my worldview. Lunging at every new publication since, though few and far between, whether poetry (“Tickets for a Prayer Wheel”), essays (“Holy The Firm”), novels (“The Living," “The Maytrees”), biography (“An American Childhood”), travelogue (“Teaching a Stone to Talk”), or writer’s/reader’s guide/memoirs (“Living by Fiction," “The Writing Life”), Dillard has the ability to transport me to the micro-dimensions of inner-life and to the macro-fantastical nether-reaches of all that is beyond. Dillard uses words to illuminate the invisible and transform the obvious. With her inquisitiveness toward the scientific, awareness of the psychological, experience of human nature, and mastery of the function of words, she guides and pulls readers into a sense of soaring I have come to yearn for. Her seminal “a-ha” moment, famously described as “the tree with the lights in it,” suggests an enlightenment experience reflected in all her literary works. She can describe sailing down Puget Sound in a way that puts one in mind of Twain’s dexterity on the Mississippi (“The Living”), detail unfolding intricacies in a life-long marriage (“The Maytrees”), grippingly compare cultural connections of ancient and modern east/west wordsmiths (“Encounters with Chinese Writers”), or delight in the melange of vegetables used as medium in the portrait hanging on her motel wall (“Teaching a Stone to Talk”). Dillard points to the universe in a drop of water and creates a psychic connection to the Crab Nebula. She can blithely reference the Emperor of Bavaria in 840 C.E. and then the platinum blonde in the lobby: always uplifting, recharging, and leading, encouraging us to wake up and SEE."

Franzen on Wharton

Following up on my 2/19/12 and 2/20/12 posts on recent New Yorker stories, this third blogpost focuses on another story in the Feb. 13 and 20, 2012 issue. When I looked at the table of contents, as I always do almost immediately when I receive a new issue of this magazine, I was very happy to note that there was a piece on Edith Wharton, a writer whose work I have read and re-read over the years, have taught, greatly admired, and truly enjoyed (see my post of 4/18/10). The next relevant piece of information was that the story was by Jonathan Franzen, a writer I have mixed feelings about. Readers of this blog may remember that I liked “The Corrections” very much, but never warmed up to his more recent novel, “Freedom.” (See my posts of 11/8/10, 11/11/10, and 11/13/10, detailing my struggles with and ambivalence about “Freedom”). So I was very interested to find out what Franzen would write about Wharton, and at the same time a bit wary. Sure enough, he first wrote about his reservations about her, starting with a very negative portrayal of her “privileged life” and her “indulging her passion for gardens and interior decorations, touring Europe endlessly in hired yachts or chauffeured cars, hobnobbing with the powerful and the famous,” and so on. One of my first responses was to wonder why Franzen was highlighting this aspect of her life, when many authors have had privileged lives. Was it because she was a woman? And was this really the most relevant information about her and her sublime fiction? He then went on to say that Wharton “did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.” Once again, my reaction was to wonder why male critics so often discuss the appearances of female authors. In any case, Franzen’s initial main point is that we need to feel sympathy for an author, and for her/his characters, in order to admire the author and her/his work; since (in his view) neither Wharton nor most of her characters are sympathetic, it is hard to like and/or admire her work. Franzen then dissects three Wharton novels: “The House of Mirth,” “The Custom of the Country,” and “The Age of Innocence.” He speculates on why, despite the main characters being hard to sympathize with (again, in his view) because of various failings, including ambition, crudeness, and shallowness, he, and we, are still drawn to the novels. He decides that “sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character…One of the great perplexities of fiction…is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life.” He gives as examples Becky Sharp and Tom Ripley. And so, after more discussion, Franzen comes around to the conclusion that despite creating unsympathetic characters, Wharton helps readers understand their contexts and why they are the people they are. His concluding sentence is that “What you get…at the novel’s end, is sympathy.” I follow Franzen’s argument, but somehow it all seems like a set-up, a construction and round-about interpretation of Wharton’s fiction that leads to a rather arid conclusion. I still can’t really tell if Franzen actually likes reading Wharton’s work. I know, I know… that is not the point of literary criticism. But I would like to be able to discern that simple fact somewhere in a critic’s writing. Further, although I was interested in Franzen’s take on Wharton, I don’t feel I learned much from it about her or her work, and I feel that the whole essay was a sort of house of cards. Further still -- and I fully realize that this part is probably a bit unfair on my part -- I got the feeling from this piece that Franzen admires Wharton only reluctantly, and that he feels he is doing her a favor by -- finally -- praising her. And that doesn’t sit well with me.

"The Plagiarist's Tale"

After I posted on 2/19/12 about a 2/6/12 New Yorker story about Chinese workplace novels, I read two additional fascinating book-related articles in The New Yorker, this time in the February 13 & 20, 2012 issue; I will write about one today and one next time. The first article, “The Plagiarist’s Tale,” by Lizzie Widdicombe, details the case of Quentin Rowan, who wrote under the pen name Q. R. Markham, and whose works over a period of 15 years were patchworks of hundreds of excerpts from the work of other authors, some quite famous. Widdicombe points out that “originality is a relative concept in literature,” as “ideas are doomed to be rehashed….Rowan’s method, though – constructing his work almost entirely from other people’s sentences and paragraphs – makes his book a singular literary artifact,” or, according to Thomas Mallon, “an ‘off-the-charts case’ both in the extent of the plagiarism and in the variety of Rowan’s sources.” The article delves into Rowan’s background, and the way in which he gradually plagiarized more and more, while constantly fearing and believing he would get caught, as he eventually -- but only when his novel “Assassin of Secrets” was published and sold well -- did. Rowan characterizes his plagiarism as an addiction, one as powerful as alcoholism -- an interesting take on plagiarism!